Dior Makes Waves (Literally) With First-Ever Guest Designer ERL

Earlier this month, a fleet of saddlebag-wearing skater boys sailed through a 30-foot-tall, nylon blue wave at Dior Men’s spring 2023 runway, in Venice Beach, California. From pearl-studded cable-knits and pastel sweaters draped over flannel coats to vintage, newspaper-printed shorts, each look was a jarring revival of a classic 1990s style, reimagined through the lens of guest designer Eli Russel Linnetz, of ERL, a California native, and imbued with a counterculture twist.

Residents of Windward Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, peered down from their rooftops as their street, lined with thrift shops and taquerias, transformed into a runway framed by VIP guests including Jaden Smith and Tony Hawk, eager to get a glimpse into the heritage house’s first show in the seaside town. The landscape and culture of California was the intersecting inspiration behind the co-branded ERL x Dior collection—hence the ocean-inspired runway set—as L.A. was both Linnetz’s birthplace and a pivotal market for Christian Dior when he first came to America.

“We started looking at the Dior archive from the year of my birth, 1991. This was during the era of Gianfranco Ferré’s artistic direction and was a part of the history of Dior that felt completely fresh for both Kim [Jones] and me,” Linnetz said in a statement. “The idea of ‘maximalism’ comes from there and from me—a coming together of chaos and perfectionism. There’s a collision of moments in time and history throughout the collection of cross generational and spatial meetings in time.”

A similar thinking rippled into the runway show’s set design, which took 48 hours to build on-site. Inspired by Escape from L.A., the 1996 apocalyptic flick by John Carpenter, the runway paid homage to the energy of California surf and skate counterculture, as well as the physical landscape of Venice Beach. A marine blue, 260-foot-long runway stretched down Windsor Avenue, while a 30-foot-tall nylon blue structure that represented a breaking wave framed the street.